When President Trump publicly backed a bill to curb legal immigration, he placed a decades-old idea—that until now had been largely sidelined—back into the mainstream.

Earlier this month, Trump threw his weight behind a modified version of the Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy Act, a measure first introduced by Republican Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue in February that would cut legal immigration to the United States by 50 percent over a decade. “Finally, the reforms in the RAISE Act will help ensure that newcomers to our wonderful country will be assimilated, will succeed, and will achieve the American Dream,” Trump said in an announcement from the White House.

Immigration-restrictionist groups immediately praised Trump’s endorsement. “Seeing the President standing with the bill's sponsors at the White House gives hope to the tens of millions of struggling Americans in stagnant jobs or outside the labor market altogether,” said Roy Beck, the president of NumbersUSA, in a statement. “President Trump is to be praised for moving beyond the easy issue of enforcement,” wrote Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, in The National Interest.

Related Story

Cotton and Perdue’s bill targets the family reunification component of the 1965 Immigration Act by giving visa preference only to immediate family and eliminating the diversity visa lottery, which allots a certain number of visas to countries “with historically low rates of immigration to the United States.” It also proposes a merit-based immigration system, which gives preference to highly-skilled and educated individuals. After 10 years, the measure projects, immigration levels would drop to nearly 540,000 a year, a 50 percent drop from the current rate.

Trump, who made cracking down on immigration a cornerstone of his campaign, has presented immigration restrictionists with the best opportunity to reduce legal immigration in a generation. The RAISE Act itself is reminiscent of recommendations made in the 1990s to overhaul the U.S. immigration system in order to reduce the number of immigrants in the United States.

White House aides have been working with the two Republican senators on the legislation, as has Republican Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, a key player during attempts to change the legal immigration system in the 1990s. “I have been in discussions with Members of Congress and the Administration since President Trump took office in January,” Smith told me in an email. “I worked with Senators Cotton and [Perdue] in crafting the RAISE Act.”

By the 1990s, the United States was reckoning with a significant uptick of immigrants. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, a sweeping bill that opened the doors to immigrants from around the world, and a 1986 law that granted citizenship to undocumented immigrants in the United States, both contributed to an influx in the foreign-born American population. Then, in 1990, George H.W. Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990, which increased the number of legal immigrants allowed entry to the United States. Notably, the legislation also set up the Commission on Legal Immigration Reform to examine U.S. policies. Barbara Jordan, a former Democratic congresswoman from Texas, headed the panel.

“The whole commission was not about reducing immigration per se. It was about what is the right level of immigration, so that we’re not disproportionally harming America’s most vulnerable workers,” said Rosemary Jenks, the director of government relations at NumbersUSA.

In 1995, the panel recommended cutting legal immigration by one-third, so that the U.S. would allow in 700,000 a year and later, 550,000 immigrants a year—a major drop from the current level at the time, 830,000 a year. The commission suggested limiting preferences for the extended family of U.S. citizens and permanent residents, who could previously apply for a visa under the 1965 Immigration Act, and basing entry entry on job skills.

To some degree, the recommendations were reflective of the national discourse at the time, which focused on how foreign-born workers were affecting the economy. On the one end, the labor movement was opposed to immigration, seeing it as a disadvantage to native-born workers, while on the other, corporations expressed support for amnesty because they employed skilled immigrants. “There were a lot of undocumented immigrants in the United States who had overstayed their visas and who in fact [were] holding very responsible jobs in science, technology, who were entrepreneurial, and moreover, better-educated class of immigrant, which was a real plus for the high-tech firms,” said Alan Kraut, a history professor at American University.

This put the Democratic Party, which has by and large been pro-immigration and pro-labor, in a bind. “In Clinton’s case, he felt he could shoot up the middle and retain loyalty within the American labor movement and also loyalty on the part of the various immigration groups because after all, where else could they turn,” Kraut said. But there was another shift happening in the Democratic Party—the demographic change sparked by the 1965 law was altering the party’s base. In 1992, for example, 76 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters were non-Hispanic whites compared to 57 percent today, according to the Pew Research Center.

The proposals, and the Clinton administration’s embrace of it, received pushback from immigrant advocacy groups and some Republicans, who argued that reducing legal immigration would in fact hinder the economy. “Most immigrants today are not sponges off the system; they are hard-working, and they carry with them that work ethic that made America great,” then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey, a Republican from Texas, told his constituents.

Still, the commission’s findings had reinforced Smith’s proposals on legal immigration, Jenks said. Smith introduced legislation that sought to place greater emphasis on skills and scrap the diversity visa program, similar to what the RAISE Act aims to do today. Meanwhile, in the Senate, Al Simpson introduced a piece of legislation that, like Smith’s, aimed to crackdown on illegal immigration and curb legal immigration. In the end, provisions on legal immigration failed to pass in both chambers—leaving the Clinton administration with a choice about whether to support new restrictions on illegal immigration.

“The administration told the Congress that the president would veto a bill that included the legal immigration reductions,” said Doris Meissner, the former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. “They were left with a dilemma—the Congress—of whether they wanted to try to pass a bill that had the legal immigration reductions in it and face the possibility of a presidential veto or whether they were going to do what was called ‘split the bill’ and deal with just illegal immigration—and that’s what they decided to do because the administration was willing to cooperate with that.”

The pressures from outside groups might have swayed the president’s decision, Meissner said. The New York Times reported at the time that “the proposals drew criticism from a wide range of business, ethnic and religious groups.” Kraut added: “Clinton understood, as the Democrats understood that came before them, that you must have the ethnic vote. And for him, the growing strength of the Latino vote and the growing strength of the Asian vote and the growing strength of other groups like that necessitated that he have a reasonably pro-immigration stance.”

The White House is playing a significant role in thrusting the proposal into the mainstream.

Since then, attempts to reform the U.S. immigration system have faltered in the face of heated political opposition to the legalization of undocumented immigrants. George W. Bush’s immigration reform bill in 2007 would have provided legal status for millions of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., set up a new guest-worker program, and included a merit-based system. It died in the Democratic-controlled Senate due to opposition from the right and left. Barack Obama, who was elected in 2008 on a promise to reform the immigration system, took his pass in 2013: A group of senators, dubbed the Gang of Eight, drafted bipartisan legislation that included enforcement measures and offered a pathway to citizenship, but was killed in the Republican-controlled House. Largely left out of the national dialogue were proposals to reduce legal immigration.

Cotton and Perdue’s bill reintroduces the recommendations made by the Commission on Immigration Reform and later adopted by Smith in his legislation. “The commission made the recommendation, as we are today, of admitting individuals with the education, skills and abilities that we need in America, and placing less of an emphasis on extended family members,” Smith said in an email. “These reforms make sure that our immigration policies protect hard-working Americans.” He added: “If President Clinton hadn’t switched his position several weeks before the 1996 bill, we would have accomplished legal immigration reform then.”

The White House is playing a significant role in thrusting the proposal into the mainstream. On the day that Trump backed the legislation, top White House adviser Stephen Miller addressed the proposed changes at a White House briefing. “The effect of this, switching to a skills-based system and ending unfettered chain migration, would be, over time, you would cut net migration in half, which polling shows is supported overwhelmingly by the American people in very large numbers,” he said. The White House has since pushed out a series of releases highlighting praise for the RAISE Act.

“The very fact that it got this kind of high-profile presidential treatment means that this is an issue that’s not going away,” Krikorian told me.

Any changes to legal immigration could have a profound impact on the demographic makeup of the country. According to the Department of Homeland Security, roughly two-thirds of immigrants were given green cards because of family connections in the United States in fiscal year 2017—and approximately 13 percent “obtained status under an employment-based preference category.” As Tom Gjelten, the author of A Nation of Nations: A Great American Immigration Story, wrote in The Atlantic: “The key lesson of the 1965 reforms is that social engineering through the adjustment of immigration policy is no simple matter—and almost any such effort will produce dramatic, unintended consequences.” That could be the case in transitioning over to a point system that prioritizes high-skilled immigrants.

Critics of the merit-based system argue that it could hinder the economy by hurting industries that rely on low-skilled immigrant labor, while some economists say higher-skilled immigrants could contribute more to the economy.

It’s not clear if and when the bill would progress through Congress. For one, lawmakers plan on taking up tax reform next. And a bill would need 60 votes in the Senate to advance, meaning it’d have to receive some Democratic support. There’s also no indication that leadership plans on taking it up; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been mum on the legislation. Smith, for his part, will introduce a companion bill in the House in September. “My bill will have the same contours as the Senate bill, but we haven’t finalized every word,” he told me.

Just the fact that the proposals have picked up steam again is reassuring for some. “We had a small window in the mid-1990s because of Barbara Jordan. It was OK to talk about immigration and reducing it and then that window closed and now we have an opportunity to have a serious public debate,” Jenks said. There’s no promise, however, that its fate this time around will be any different.

About the Author

Most Popular

The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a “safe haven” law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family—nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Here are some readers with extra elements on this discussion—political, cultural, international. First, an American reader on the interaction of current concepts of masculinity and the nearly all-male population of mass gun murderers:

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

Outside powers have been central to the nuclear crisis—but for a few peculiar weeks in February.

Of all the arguments in favor of allowing North Korea to leap into the spotlight with South Korea at the Winter Olympics—what with its deceptively smiley diplomats and even more smiley cheerleaders and the world’s most celebrated winless hockey team—one hasn’t received much attention. “It’s tragic that people of shared history, blood, language, and culture have been divided through geopolitics of the superpowers,” Talia Yoon, a resident of Seoul, toldThe New York Times when the paper asked South Koreans for their thoughts on the rapprochement between North and South Korea at the Olympics. “Neither Korea has ever been truly independent since the division.”

In this telling, having Korean athletes march under a unification flag at the Opening Ceremony and compete jointly in women’s hockey isn’t just about the practical goal of ensuring the Games aren’t disrupted by an act of North Korean aggression, or the loftier objective of seizing a rare opportunity for a diplomatic resolution to the escalating crisis over Kim Jong Un’s nuclear-weapons program. It’s also about Koreans—for a couple surreal weeks in February, at least—plucking some control over that crisis from the superpowers that have been so influential in shaping it over the past year.

Recognizing that Americans are not the future of his religion, the late preacher embraced “the black world, the white world, the yellow world, the rich world, the poor world.”

Billy Graham, who died Wednesday at the age of 99, may have been “America’s Pastor,” but he was also a man of the world. From the early days of his ministry, when he visited U.S. military forces in Korea, to his quiet message of healing at Washington Cathedral in the aftermath of September 11, Graham was a frequent commentator on—and participant in—global politics. He used his status as the most important American religious figure of the 20th century to help lead American evangelicals into a more robust engagement with the rest of the world. He was also an institution builder who was deeply invested in Christianity as a global faith.

There were other people who taught more missionaries, and some who reached more people on television; there were even those whose preaching events rivaled Graham’s in size. But no one else did as much to turn evangelicalism into an international movement that could stand alongside—and ultimately challenge—both the Vatican and the liberal World Council of Churches for the mantle of global Christian leadership.